Gaza: La lutte en cours à Gaza et dans toute la Palestine est la nôtre (In today’s upside-down world, it is remarkable when a world leader simply tells the truth and turns out not to be a hypocrite, a political coward, or an appeaser)

A Palestinian paramedic touches the hand of a dead girl in the overflowing morgue of Shifa Hospital in Gaza City on Sunday (NYT)

Israeli troops fired toward the Gaza Strip from their position near the border on Saturday. Israeli strikes killed 20 people in Gaza (NYT)

It’s the moral equivalence which is so devastating. When Egypt this week proposed its ceasefire in Gaza, a BBC presenter asked whether both sides would now conclude that there was no point carrying on with the war. From the start, restraint has been urged on both sides — as if more than 1,100 rocket attacks on Israel in three weeks had the same weight as trying to stop this onslaught once and for all. Israel has been bombing Gaza solely to stop Hamas and its associates from trying to kill Israeli citizens. But for many in the West, the driving necessity is not to stop Hamas but to stop Israel. Moral equivalence morphs instantly into moral bankruptcy. People have looked at the casualty count — around 200 Palestinians killed at the time of writing, while only a handful of Israelis have been injured or killed — and decided that this proves Israel is a monstrous aggressor. No concern at all for the Israelis who have only a few seconds to rush to a shelter when the sirens start to wail, car drivers flinging themselves to the ground at the side of the road. No concern for the elderly or disabled Israelis who can’t get to a shelter, the hospital patients left helpless while the rockets slam into the ground nearby. Just imagine if the Scots, for example, had for years been firing at England volleys of rockets that were now putting 40-50 million people within range. Unimaginable? Of course it is. No country would tolerate it. But that’s the equivalent situation in which tiny Israel has found itself. Yet it is simultaneously having to fight another war: against a West determined to demonise it with accusations of deliberate atrocities, lack of restraint or an attempt to conquer more land. To these people, whatever Israel does to defend itself is bad. Killing Gazans is bad, warning them to flee so they won’t be killed is bad, the Iron Dome missile defence system is bad because, while Palestinians are being killed, Israelis are not. Ah yes, that’s the real outrage, isn’t it? Not enough dead Jews. How dare they defend themselves so effectively! And so the West does Hamas’s dirty work for it. Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. Its strategy is not just to kill Israelis and demoralise the population, but also to de-legitimise Israel so that the West, too, will work for its destruction. Hamas’s rockets have failed in the first two objectives — but the third is a runaway success. In its hundreds of tunnels, Hamas has built an underground infrastructure of industrialised terror the length of Gaza. As a Fatah spokesman blurted out, it has situated its arsenal among civilians, underneath schools and hospitals and mosques, for the infernal purpose of using its population as human shields and human sacrifices. It has urged Gazans to make themselves the target of Israeli air strikes. It has ordered them to ignore the Israeli warnings to evacuate, which are delivered by leaflet, phone, text and warning shots. Doesn’t the Israel-atrocity brigade ever pause to wonder why Hamas has provided no air-raid shelters for its people, while Israel has constructed a national shelter system? Gazan civilians are dying in order to maximise their numbers killed in the war, so that Hamas can incite against Israel in both the Muslim world and the West. And it openly games the PR system. Hamas social media guidelines instruct Gazans not to post pictures of missiles launched from ‘residential areas’ and always to add the term ‘innocent citizen’ to any casualty’s name. So the figures it issues for civilian as opposed to terrorist casualties, re-circulated by the UN, are worthless. Israel is waging this war in accordance with international law, which states that when houses are used for military purposes they may become legitimate military targets. But as Ibrahim Kreisheh, the Palestinian delegate to the UN Human Rights Council, admitted in a remarkable TV interview, while Israel’s killing of civilians is considered in law merely a mistake, Hamas is committing war crimes by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. Indeed, given its use of Gazan human shields, it is guilty of war crimes twice over. All civilian casualties, however, are deeply to be regretted and to be avoided wherever possible. And so Gaza presents Israel with a hideous dilemma. Either it inescapably kills a lot of civilians as a by-product of destroying the infrastructure of mass murder, or it leaves that infrastructure at least partly in place to spare the civilians. Until now, it has chosen the latter. It is also allowing food and fuel into Gaza; its offer of blood supplies was turned down by the Palestinian Authority. When a Hamas rocket downed a power line supplying electricity to 70,000 Gazans, workers from the Israel Electric Company braved Hamas rocket fire to restore power to Gaza — enabling it to fire more rockets at Israel. Yet it is Israel which is said to be ‘out of control’, guilty of indiscriminate slaughter and even — as ludicrous as it is obscene — ‘genocide’. Those who demonise Israel in this way should realise just what they are supporting. Palestinian society, both through Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah (whose military wing has also been firing rockets from Gaza), brainwashes its children that glory lies in killing Jews. It routinely pumps out Judeophobic incitement straight from the Nazi playbook.(…) Every western supporter of the Palestinian war against Israel is also tacitly supporting such anti-Jewish derangement. This psychotic bigotry is the true driver of that war, as well as the Islamist war against the West. Yet astoundingly it is never, ever mentioned. The intractable problem of Gaza has been exacerbated by the meddling incomprehension of a western world that just doesn’t grasp how Islamist fanatics play by entirely different rules. The West insists on moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, as if the century-old conflict between the Arabs and the Jews were simply a squabble over the equitable division of land. It is not. It is a war to destroy the Jewish national homeland by people driven into frenzy by forces immune to reason.Melanie Philips

Something important is missing from the New York Times’s coverage of the war in Gaza: photographs of terrorist attacks on Israel, and pictures of Hamas fighters, tunnels, weaponry, and use of human shields. It appears the Times is silently but happily complying with a Hamas demand that the only pictures from Gaza are of civilians and never of fighters. The most influential news organization in the world is thus manufacturing an utterly false portrait of the battle—precisely the portrait that Hamas finds most helpful: embattled, victimized Gaza civilians under attack by a cruel Israeli military. A review of the Times’s photography in Gaza reveals a stark contrast in how the two sides are portrayed. Nearly every picture from Israel depicts tanks, soldiers, or attack helicopters. And every picture of Gaza depicts either bloodied civilians, destroyed buildings, overflowing hospitals, or other images of civilian anguish. It is as one-sided and misleading a depiction of the Gaza battle as one can imagine. (…) Maybe all of this is an illustration of just how biased against Israel the Times has become—so biased that Times photographers and editors are simply blind to any image that doesn’t conform to their view of the war. Or maybe, in the interest of the safety and access of their journalists, the Times is complying with Hamas instructions. As reported by MEMRI, Hamas published media guidelines instructing Gazans to always refer to the dead as « innocent civilians » and to never post pictures of terrorists on social media. Hamas is currently preventing foreign journalists from leaving the Strip, in effect holding them hostage. These journalists must be terrified—and they also must know that the best way to ensure their safety is to never run afoul of the terrorists in whose hands their fates lie. It would appear that Hamas’s media instructions have been heard loud and clear at the New York Times, and the response is obedience. But the Times also isn’t bothering to inform its readers that the images they’re seeing of Gaza are only the ones Hamas wants them to see. It’s time for the Times to tell its readers exactly why they are being presented with such a distorted picture of this war.Noah Pollak (Weekly standard)

“I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets in the face of a goodwill effort to offer a ceasefire,” Secretary of State John Kerry declared on July 15. Actually, there are a number of things that Secretary Kerry could be doing beyond issuing statements expressing dismay. The Obama Administration could take meaningful actions to show Hamas that there is a political price to be paid for its terrorism against Israel. Let’s start with the money. The United States gives $500-million each year (more than $10-billion since 1994) to the Palestinian Authority regime. Even after the PA earlier this year created a new unity government with Hamas – long designated by Washington to be a terrorist organization – the Obama Administration kept writing the checks. How does the Administration justify maintaining a half billion dollars annual subsidy to a PA-Hamas coalition? By pretending that Hamas, the coalition partner, actually has nothing to do with the coalition. The individual functionaries in the government are not Hamas members but “technocrats,” the Administration insists. That’s the favorite new word of U.S. Mideast policymakers. Their theory – as absurd as this may sound – is that if someone is appointed by Hamas, but does not actually carry a laminated Hamas membership card in his wallet, then he’s just a “technocrat,” not a Hamas appointee. Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn

By pressing for “restraint” and a “truce,” Obama and Kerry are, in effect, trying to save Hamas from being crippled or destroyed by Israel. Is that their idea of “having Israel’s back” ? Now contrast the Obama-Kerry line that with the words of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week: “The indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel are terrorist acts, for which there is no justification.” “It is evident that Hamas is deliberately using human shields to further terror in the region.” “Failure by the international community to condemn these reprehensible actions would encourage these terrorists to continue their appalling actions.” “Canada calls on its allies and partners to recognize that these terrorist acts are unacceptable and that solidarity with Israel is the best way of stopping the conflict.” There was really nothing controversial in Harper’s words. They were simple statements of fact. But in today’s upside-down world, it is remarkable when a world leader simply tells the truth about Israel and the Palestinians. It’s almost as if we are surprised when a world leader turns out not to be a hypocrite, a political coward, or an appeaser. We’re so used to the international community’s outrageous double standards, that it becomes remarkable when a national leader acts like a mensch. Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn

Israel long ago learned that you can tell who your real friends are when the chips are down. The Gaza war is proving that again.
During the 2012 election campaign, when polls showed that President Barack Obama might lose a significant portion of the Jewish vote in key electoral states, he declared that he “will always have Israel’s back.”

But this past week, as hundreds of Hamas rockets rained down upon the Jewish State, and Israel really needed an ally to have its back, President Obama called Prime Minister Netanyahu to demand that Israel show “restraint.”

That was followed the next day by a phone call from Secretary of State John Kerry to Netanyahu, warning against “escalating tensions” and pressing Israel to let him “mediate a truce.”

The last thing Israel needs is a “truce” with Hamas. The Israelis have had two of those already. A “truce” means Hamas gets several more years to build up its supply of rockets, in preparation for the next round.

And with every new round, Hamas has new rockets that can reach even further and cause even more devastation.
By pressing for “restraint” and a “truce,” Obama and Kerry are, in effect, trying to save Hamas from being crippled or destroyed by Israel. Is that their idea of “having Israel’s back” ?

Now contrast the Obama-Kerry line that with the words of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week:

“The indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel are terrorist acts, for which there is no justification.”
“It is evident that Hamas is deliberately using human shields to further terror in the region.”
“Failure by the international community to condemn these reprehensible actions would encourage these terrorists to continue their appalling actions.”
“Canada calls on its allies and partners to recognize that these terrorist acts are unacceptable and that solidarity with Israel is the best way of stopping the conflict.”

There was really nothing controversial in Harper’s words. They were simple statements of fact. But in today’s upside-down world, it is remarkable when a world leader simply tells the truth about Israel and the Palestinians.

It’s almost as if we are surprised when a world leader turns out not to be a hypocrite, a political coward, or an appeaser. We’re so used to the international community’s outrageous double standards, that it becomes remarkable when a national leader acts like a mensch.
The sixth lesson from the Gaza war: Israel has a true friend in Ottawa. The White House could learn a thing or two from Stephen Harper about what it really means to have someone’s back.

Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America.

“I cannot condemn strongly enough the actions of Hamas in so brazenly firing rockets in the face of a goodwill effort to offer a ceasefire,” Secretary of State John Kerry declared on July 15.

Actually, there are a number of things that Secretary Kerry could be doing beyond issuing statements expressing dismay. The Obama Administration could take meaningful actions to show Hamas that there is a political price to be paid for its terrorism against Israel.

Let’s start with the money.

The United States gives $500-million each year (more than $10-billion since 1994) to the Palestinian Authority regime. Even after the PA earlier this year created a new unity government with Hamas – long designated by Washington to be a terrorist organization – the Obama Administration kept writing the checks.

How does the Administration justify maintaining a half billion dollars annual subsidy to a PA-Hamas coalition? By pretending that Hamas, the coalition partner, actually has nothing to do with the coalition. The individual functionaries in the government are not Hamas members but “technocrats,” the Administration insists. That’s the favorite new word of U.S. Mideast policymakers. Their theory – as absurd as this may sound – is that if someone is appointed by Hamas, but does not actually carry a laminated Hamas membership card in his wallet, then he’s just a “technocrat,” not a Hamas appointee.

State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki took this absurdity to a new level in her daily press briefing on July 7, by converting “technocrat” from a noun to a proper noun. She twice referred to the PA-Hamas regime as “the Technocratic Government,” as if that is its official name.

So here’s our first action item for Secretary Kerry: admit that Hamas is part of the PA-Hamas government, and stop giving it American taxpayer dollars.

What else could the Obama Administration do, aside from professing outrage at Hamas? Plenty.

1. Obama could insist that Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas carry out a real crackdown on the Hamas terror cells that operate in PA-controlled territories. The New York Times reported on March 23 that Israeli troops entered the Jenin refugee camp in pursuit of terrorists because although Jenin is under the “full control” of the Palestinian Authority, “the Palestinian [security forces] did not generally operate in refugee camps.” Yet those camps are the worst incubators of Hamas terrorist activity.

2. Secretary Kerry could also be calling America’s allies to demand that they make their financial aid to Gaza conditional on Hamas ceasing its terrorism.

4. The Administration could stop pushing Israel to ease up on its blockade of Gaza, a blockade that has prevented weapons and dual-use materials from reaching the Hamas regime.

5. The Administration could offer a reward for information leading to the Hamas terrorists who kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers, one of whom was an American citizen. For some inexplicable reason, the Rewards for Justice website, http://www.rewardsforjustice.net, still makes no mention of the kidnap-murder of 16 year-old Naftali Fraenkel. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) have introduced bipartisan legislation requiring such a reward. It shouldn’t take Congress to force the Obama Administration to take such a simple and obvious step.

Strongly-worded condemnations of Hamas make for good sound bites, but unless backed by real action, they’re meaningless.

The fifth lesson from the Gaza war: It’s time for the Obama Administration’s actions against Hamas to speak louder than its words.

Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is anchored in the premise that the mainstream Palestinian leadership has truly given up its old terrorist ways. Yasser Arafat and his Fatah movement – the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization – put down their guns and “recognized” Israel. The bad guys became the good guys, and the only bad guys are left are a small minority of Hamas extremists.

The Gaza war provides an opportunity to test that theory. Hamas kidnaps and murders Israeli teenagers, and fires hundreds of rockets into Israel. How has Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah, responded?

If Abbas and his Fatah movement are truly moderate and against terrorism, then they should side with Israel against the terrorists. If Abbas and Fatah are indeed the good guys, then they should be opposed to the bad guys.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out that way.

On the very first day of the war, Fatah’s official Facebook page, called “Fatah – The Main Page” posted what it called “A message to the Israeli government and the Israeli people.” Here’s what Abbas’ Fatah had to say to Israelis as hundreds of rockets were being fired at them from Gaza: “Death will reach you from the south to the north. Flee our country and you won’t die. The KN-103 rocket is on its way toward you.”

And that was just the beginning.

On July 9, a cartoon on the Fatah Facebook page, titled “Israel Fires Rockets at Gaza,” showed an Israeli bomb, adorned with a huge swastika, about to strike a Palestinian child. (It’s worth recalling that the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, among others, has said that comparing Israel to the Nazis is anti-Semitic.)

Perhaps the most telling item of all on Fatah’s Facebook page is a dramatic full-color illustration of three heavily-armed Palestinians – one from Hamas, one from Islamic Jihad, and one from Fatah, standing together. The text reads: “Brothers in Arms: One God, one homeland, one enemy, one goal!” If anyone doubts whose side Fatah is on, this makes it crystal clear.

A video segment on Fatah’s Facebook page shows a masked Fatah member standing amidst a huge arsenal of rockets, declaring: “Praise Allah, our jihad fighters have managed to develop these rockets so they will reach the Zionist depth, Allah willing, to a distance of 45 kilometers inside the occupied Palestinian territories…With these rocket we will liberate our Jerusalem. With these rockets we will crush the Zionist enemy…”

And it’s not just words. On July 7, Fatah’s Facebook page announced that Fatah’s military unit, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, “targeted the enemy’s bases and settlements with 35 rockets.” (All translations are courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch.)

When the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians were signed in 1993, the U.S. State Department removed Fatah from its list of terrorist groups. Removing it was not just a statement of how the U.S. views Fatah; it also made it legally possible for the U.S. to start sending $500 million to the Palestinian Authority and the PLO, of which Fatah is the largest faction. Now that Fatah has openly boasted that it is carrying out rocket terrorism against Israel, it’s time to put Fatah back on the U.S. list of terrorist groups.

Fatah and Hamas both belong on that list because, in the end, they are birds of a feather. Certainly there have been moments of tension between the two movements. But those clashes reflected either internal disputes unrelated to Israel, or differences in tactics regarding Israel – not differences in their overall goals.

The third lesson from the Gaza war: The “moderate” Palestinian leadership has shown its true colors. It sides with the terrorists, not with Israel.

Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn are members of the board of the Religious Zionists of America.

Noah Pollak

The Weekly Standard

July 20, 2014

Something important is missing from the New York Times‘s coverage of the war in Gaza: photographs of terrorist attacks on Israel, and pictures of Hamas fighters, tunnels, weaponry, and use of human shields.

It appears the Times is silently but happily complying with a Hamas demand that the only pictures from Gaza are of civilians and never of fighters. The most influential news organization in the world is thus manufacturing an utterly false portrait of the battle—precisely the portrait that Hamas finds most helpful: embattled, victimized Gaza civilians under attack by a cruel Israeli military.

A review of the Times‘s photography in Gaza reveals a stark contrast in how the two sides are portrayed. Nearly every picture from Israel depicts tanks, soldiers, or attack helicopters. And every picture of Gaza depicts either bloodied civilians, destroyed buildings, overflowing hospitals, or other images of civilian anguish. It is as one-sided and misleading a depiction of the Gaza battle as one can imagine.

Today’s Times photo essay contains seven images: three of Gaza civilians in distress; one of a smoke plume rising over Gaza; and three of the IDF, including tanks and attack helicopters. The message is simple and clear: the IDF is attacking Gaza and harming Palestinian civilians. There are no images of Israelis under rocket attack, no images of grieving Israeli families and damaged Israeli buildings, no images of Hamas fighters or rocket attacks on Israel, no images of the RPG’s and machine guns recovered from attempted Hamas tunnel infiltrations into Israel.

Another report yesterday was accompanied by a single image: that of a dead child in a Gaza hospital.

A second report yesterday, ostensibly about Hamas tunnel attacks on Israel, bizarrely contained not a single picture related to those attacks. The three pictures it contained presented the same one-sided narrative of Israelis as attackers, Palestinians as victims. One picture showed an IDF artillery gun firing into Gaza; a second showed Palestinian mourners at a funeral; a third showed Palestinians waiting in line for food rations.

Indeed, a check of the Twitter feed of the Times’s photographer in Gaza shows not a single image that portrays Hamas in a negative light. It’s nothing but civilian victims of the IDF.

Likewise, the Twitter feed of Anne Barnard, the Beirut bureau chief for the Times currently « reporting » from Gaza, is almost entirely devoted to one thing: anecdotes, pictures, and stories about civilian casualties. Perusing her feed, one would think there are simply no terrorists in Gaza who started this war, who are perpetuating it, who are intentionally attacking Israel from neighborhoods and apartment buildings and thereby guaranteeing the very civilian casualties Barnard appears so heartbroken over.

Maybe all of this is an illustration of just how biased against Israel the Times has become—so biased that Times photographers and editors are simply blind to any image that doesn’t conform to their view of the war.

Or maybe, in the interest of the safety and access of their journalists, the Times is complying with Hamas instructions. As reported by MEMRI, Hamas published media guidelines instructing Gazans to always refer to the dead as « innocent civilians » and to never post pictures of terrorists on social media. Hamas is currently preventing foreign journalists from leaving the Strip, in effect holding them hostage. These journalists must be terrified—and they also must know that the best way to ensure their safety is to never run afoul of the terrorists in whose hands their fates lie.

It would appear that Hamas’s media instructions have been heard loud and clear at the New York Times, and the response is obedience. But the Times also isn’t bothering to inform its readers that the images they’re seeing of Gaza are only the ones Hamas wants them to see. It’s time for the Times to tell its readers exactly why they are being presented with such a distorted picture of this war.

Voir encore:

Israel abandoned
The anti-Semitic West almost seems to want Israelis to suffer
Melanie Phillips
19 July 2014

It’s the moral equivalence which is so devastating. When Egypt this week proposed its ceasefire in Gaza, a BBC presenter asked whether both sides would now conclude that there was no point carrying on with the war. From the start, restraint has been urged on both sides — as if more than 1,100 rocket attacks on Israel in three weeks had the same weight as trying to stop this onslaught once and for all.

Israel has been bombing Gaza solely to stop Hamas and its associates from trying to kill Israeli citizens. But for many in the West, the driving necessity is not to stop Hamas but to stop Israel.

Moral equivalence morphs instantly into moral bankruptcy. People have looked at the casualty count — around 200 Palestinians killed at the time of writing, while only a handful of Israelis have been injured or killed — and decided that this proves Israel is a monstrous aggressor.

No concern at all for the Israelis who have only a few seconds to rush to a shelter when the sirens start to wail, car drivers flinging themselves to the ground at the side of the road. No concern for the elderly or dis-abled Israelis who can’t get to a shelter, the hospital patients left helpless while the rockets slam into the ground nearby.

Just imagine if the Scots, for example, had for years been firing at England volleys of rockets that were now putting 40-50 million people within range. Unimaginable? Of course it is. No country would tolerate it. But that’s the equivalent situation in which tiny Israel has found itself. Yet it is simultaneously having to fight another war: against a West determined to demonise it with accusations of deliberate atrocities, lack of restraint or an attempt to conquer more land.

To these people, whatever Israel does to defend itself is bad. Killing Gazans is bad, warning them to flee so they won’t be killed is bad, the Iron Dome missile defence system is bad because, while Palestinians are being killed, Israelis are not. Ah yes, that’s the real outrage, isn’t it? Not enough dead Jews. How dare they defend themselves so effectively!

And so the West does Hamas’s dirty work for it. Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily. Its strategy is not just to kill Israelis and demoralise the population, but also to de-legitimise Israel so that the West, too, will work for its destruction. Hamas’s rockets have failed in the first two objectives — but the third is a runaway success.

In its hundreds of tunnels, Hamas has built an underground infrastructure of industrialised terror the length of Gaza. As a Fatah spokesman blurted out, it has situated its arsenal among civilians, underneath schools and hospitals and mosques, for the infernal purpose of using its population as human shields and human sacrifices.

It has urged Gazans to make themselves the target of Israeli air strikes. It has ordered them to ignore the Israeli warnings to evacuate, which are delivered by leaflet, phone, text and warning shots.

Doesn’t the Israel-atrocity brigade ever pause to wonder why Hamas has provided no air-raid shelters for its people, while Israel has constructed a national shelter system? Gazan civilians are dying in order to maximise their numbers killed in the war, so that Hamas can incite against Israel in both the Muslim world and the West.

And it openly games the PR system. Hamas social media guidelines instruct Gazans not to post pictures of missiles launched from ‘residential areas’ and always to add the term ‘innocent citizen’ to any casualty’s name. So the figures it issues for civilian as opposed to terrorist casualties, re-circulated by the UN, are worthless.

Israel is waging this war in accordance with international law, which states that when houses are used for military purposes they may become legitimate military targets. But as Ibrahim Kreisheh, the Palestinian delegate to the UN Human Rights Council, admitted in a remarkable TV interview, while Israel’s killing of civilians is considered in law merely a mistake, Hamas is committing war crimes by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. Indeed, given its use of Gazan human shields, it is guilty of war crimes twice over.

All civilian casualties, however, are deeply to be regretted and to be avoided wherever possible. And so Gaza presents Israel with a hideous dilemma. Either it inescapably kills a lot of civilians as a by-product of destroying the infrastructure of mass murder, or it leaves that infrastructure at least partly in place to spare the civilians. Until now, it has chosen the latter.
Tensions Remain High At Israeli Gaza BorderTensions remain high at the Israeli Gaza border Photo: Getty

It is also allowing food and fuel into Gaza; its offer of blood supplies was turned down by the Palestinian Authority. When a Hamas rocket downed a power line supplying electricity to 70,000 Gazans, workers from the Israel Electric Company braved Hamas rocket fire to restore power to Gaza — en-abling it to fire more rockets at Israel.

Yet it is Israel which is said to be ‘out of control’, guilty of indiscriminate slaughter and even — as ludicrous as it is obscene — ‘genocide’.

Those who demonise Israel in this way should realise just what they are supporting. Palestinian society, both through Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah (whose military wing has also been firing rockets from Gaza), brainwashes its children that glory lies in killing Jews. It routinely pumps out Judeophobic incitement straight from the Nazi playbook.

A few days ago, Yahya Rabah, a member of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza, recycled the medieval blood libel when he wrote in Al-Hayat al-Jadida that the Jews offer sacrifices during Passover ‘made from the blood of our children’.

Every western supporter of the Palestinian war against Israel is also tacitly supporting such anti-Jewish derangement. This psychotic bigotry is the true driver of that war, as well as the Islamist war against the West. Yet astoundingly it is never, ever mentioned. The intractable problem of Gaza has been exacerbated by the meddling incomprehension of a western world that just doesn’t grasp how Islamist fanatics play by entirely different rules.

The West insists on moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, as if the century-old conflict between the Arabs and the Jews were simply a squabble over the equitable division of land. It is not. It is a war to destroy the Jewish national homeland by people driven into frenzy by forces immune to reason.

Israeli parents are now steeling themselves for the nightmare of their sons in the Israel Defence Force being deployed in a Gazan land war to stop the rockets. Some of those boys will be killed. But it will be the Palestinian casualties, the Hamas war crime, which will be used once again to blame the Jews for their own destruction.

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21 Responses to Gaza: La lutte en cours à Gaza et dans toute la Palestine est la nôtre (In today’s upside-down world, it is remarkable when a world leader simply tells the truth and turns out not to be a hypocrite, a political coward, or an appeaser)

We, the undersigned academics, lawyers, and community leaders, are profoundly perturbed by the unbalanced and partisan position adopted by the Canadian Government and federal political parties regarding the current violence in Gaza. While more than 650 Palestinians – 75% civilians, according to the United Nations – have been killed in Israel’s latest military operation, official statements have focused exclusively on denouncing Hamas’s rocket strikes (responsible for two fatalities) and uncritically proclaiming Israel’s right to self-defence.

While Hamas’s indiscriminate rocket firings are illegal under international law, Israel is still bound by basic international humanitarian law principles protecting civilians during times of war and prohibiting collective punishment. Indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza violate fundamental norms of international law. As of July 22, the toll of the ongoing offensive (the third major military assault on Gaza in six years) includes:

at least 147 children killed, including four by missile strike while playing soccer on a Gaza beach;
3 504 Palestinians injured (it is uncertain how many are civilians, but the number includes 1 100 children and 1 153 women);
2 655 families whose homes have been destroyed or severely damaged;
117 000 people displaced;
at least 90 schools and 18 health facilities damaged (including the destruction of al-Wafa Hospital, the only rehabilitation hospital in Gaza and the West Bank)
2 million people with no or very limited access to water and sanitation services.

And the toll increases by the hour.

Multiple human rights groups have documented and condemned likely Israeli war crimes in Gaza. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay concluded two weeks ago that “Deeply disturbing reports that many of the civilian casualties, including of children, occurred as a result of strikes on homes . . . raise serious doubt about whether the Israeli strikes have been in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” This week, Ms Pillay confirmed: “There seems to be a strong possibility that international law has been violated [by Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip], in a manner that could amount to war crimes.”

Amnesty International’s report observed, “In several cases of [air strikes on civilian homes in Gaza], no evidence has emerged to indicate that the alleged ‘Hamas operatives’ were inside the homes at the time of the attack, that the homes were being used to store munitions, or otherwise being used for military purposes.” According to Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Programme: “Unless the Israeli authorities can provide specific information to show how a home is being used to make an effective contribution to military actions, deliberately attacking civilian homes constitutes a war crime and also amounts to collective punishment against the families.”

Human Rights Watch similarly found that “Israeli air attacks . . . have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war.”

The disregard for international law conveyed by the Government’s silence on such potentially grave violations committed by Israel discredits Canada domestically and internationally. Moreover, adoption of such a one-sided position subverts Canada’s own official foreign policy goal of achieving a “comprehensive, just and lasting peace settlement” between Israel and Palestine. Rather than maintaining a studious silence in the face of these documented violations of international humanitarian law, a true friend would act responsibly and call Israel to account for those violations.

As a country claiming to champion universal human rights and dignity, Canada’s foreign policy must align with international law, and reflect the equal value of Palestinian and Israeli life. The callous devaluation of Palestinian life communicated by our political leaders does not represent us as Canadians.

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